Amid the Heat of Battle. Modernism, Fascism and the Values of Literature in the Interwar Period This article deals with Finland-Swedish modernism during the interwar years (1920’s and 1930’s) from a historical and conceptual perspective. Activist modernists such as Hagar Olsson, Elmer Diktonius, and Örnulf Tigerstedt questioned the liberal, humanist values of the cultural establishment, and put forward an ars militans. Their literary works were often read against the background of their cultural politics, but as recent research has shown, the works often point in a different direction, and their relations to the cultural politics of their authors were indirect or even contradictory. Though many of their works do not put forward new values in any straightforward sense, the article argues for the importance of reading their form dialectically against their sociohistorical background. The article also considers unconscious social motivation and different value paradigms within modernism, and argues that the best way of understanding the values of Finland-Swedish modernism is to consider the dialectics between the form of the works and their sociohistorical context in relation to the emerging value regime of liberal capitalism.
The contemporary reception of and value negotiations surrounding AI-generated literature in Sweden In this article, we analyze the reception of the AI-generated poetry collection Ammaseus horisont: AI tolkar Karin Boye (2020) and discuss the more general debate about AI-generated literature in the Swedish press since November 2022, when OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public. Specifically, we analyze the ways in which Swedish critics construct the literary value of Ammaseus horisont and unspecified AI-generated literature. Our analyses show that different aspects of a text’s origin – especially whether it was authored by a human being, and whether it was published by a publisher with high literary status – significantly affect the valuation process. To capture the ways in which valuation is related to origin, we use the term the origin component of literary value. While critics differ in the extent to which they correlate the origin component of literary value with textually focused values (e.g. style and form, as outlined by two of the authors of this study, Torbjörn Forslid and Anders Ohlsson, in Forslid et al., Höstens böcker: Litterära värdeförhandlingar 2013 [2015]), most agree that the origin and value of a literary text are independent of each other. For example, some critics argue that the fact that a text is AI-generated means that its literary value is lessened, even though it may be beautiful stylistically, while some argue that the same fact can increase the literary value of a text (as a formal experiment), even though the poems themselves are not seen as beautiful. In a larger literary studies perspective, the valuation of AI-generated literature evokes questions of the importance of the author and authorial intent. We discuss such questions in the context of how critics debate them.
Literary Value Viewed from a First-Person Perspective versus a Third-Person Perspective This article investigates the logical differences between approaching, and trying to understand, literary value from a first-person and a third-person perspective, respectively. The article takes as its point of departure an essay by Fredrik Hertzberg, ”Farväl kvalitet. Farväl konst.” Om litterärt värde (2023), that stirred a heated debate about literary criticism in Finland in the autumn of 2023 and spring of 2024. In his essay, Hertzberg critiques Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s seminal work, Contingencies of Value (1988), as well as scholarship and criticism that investigate literary value inspired by her theorizing. Hertzberg claims that Herrnstein Smith’s understanding of literary value is highly distortive. In this article, I argue that both Hertzberg and Herrnstein Smith (and those working within the tradition of her thought) make valid knowledge claims about literary value. But while Hertzberg approaches literary value from a first-person perspective, Herrnstein Smith (and scholars who follow her lead) is (mainly) interested in literary value as it appears from a third-person perspective. Both perspectives can yield important insights, but trouble ensues when we get these different perspectives mixed up. By appealing to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing, and Stanley Cavell’s discussion of aesthetic “fraudulence”, the article sets out to demonstrate how the first- and third-person perspectives elicit different aspects of literary value. It argues that as long as we are aware of the important logical differences pertaining to the two perspectives, we are enriched by thinking about literary value through both of them.
Negotiations of literary value and the death of the author In this article, we examine how the death of an author affects the value negotiation surrounding his or her oeuvre. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued, literary value is not a fixed category but rather something that is created and negotiated in relation to various contexts and settings. For a high evaluation of the oeuvre of a given author – or a particular work – to be maintained, this value needs to be continuously repeated or ‘made’. By publishing books, appearing in legacy and social media, and so on, the author is one of the most central actors in the negotiation of literary value. This also means that the author’s death is a critical point in the value negotiation process. In this article, we examine the impact of the death of an author on the negotiation of literary value in the case of three Swedish authors: Sven Delblanc (1931–1992), Per Olov Enquist (1934–2020), and Kristina Lugn (1948–2020). We use data from three different databases, which provide different perspectives on the tendencies we are interested in examining: Artikelsök, Mediearkivet, and Sweden's official library statistics. Our investigation shows that the media traffic surrounding these authors is clearly affected – and tends to decrease – after or in conjunction with the author’s death. The same tendency applies to library loans. For an author’s oeuvre to continue to be valued highly after the author’s death, it is necessary for other value agents/actors, for instance literary societies, biographers, etc, to step in and continue the negotiation of literary value. Through this process, some authors are eventually established as canonical. However, most authors slip into oblivion. This is a natural and necessary development, making it possible for new authors to enter the literary field.
Cultivation through suitable reading: Negotiations of literary value in Folkbiblioteksbladet, 1903–1911 This study looks at negotiations of literary value, as well as the discourse about (un)suitable literature and reading, in a Swedish library periodical published during the first decade of the 20th century. Based upon Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s definition of values and her description of literary evaluation, I examine the role of suitability in the negotiations regarding literary value which took place in Folkbiblioteksbladet, as well as the perceived purposes of literature and reading. A main aim of Folkbiblioteksbladet was to help spread suitable literature – and at the same time minimize the spreading of unsuitable literature – by guiding libraries and librarians in their selection process. This guidance, which mainly took the form of reviews but was also offered in opinion pieces, shows a perception of literature and reading as key factors in the education and cultivation of the Swedish people. Unsuitable books are perceived as unhealthy, even toxic, both for the individual and for society as a whole. The distinction between suitable and unsuitable books, while in some parts widely agreed upon, was the object of debate and a key part of the value negotiations. The study shows that emotional values, related to entertainment and the significance of awakening a passion for reading, are emphasized in Folkbiblioteksbladet. The need for books that are easy for working class readers to comprehend, as well as popular science texts, is accentuated. Aesthetic values are largely subordinated to social values, as idealism and moral content are crucial aspects of literary suitability. While moral tendency is favored, neutrality and impartiality are also highly valued, and social agitation is described as unsuitable in a library context. Economic values are mostly present in the expressed need for cheap books of high quality, as well as in concerns regarding unsuitable books being cheap, and thus accessible to common citizens.
Illness, Literature, and Value: The Reception of Contemporary Illness Narratives About Cancer This article examines how contemporary autobiographical illness narratives about cancer are received and valued in Swedish literary criticism. Drawing on a discourse analysis of 75 newspaper reviews published over the past decade, it explores the norms, expectations, and evaluative strategies that guide critics’ responses to such works, particularly those written by established authors. The analysis is informed by Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s theory of value as a negotiated and dynamic process. Four interrelated value categories—stylistic and formal value, knowledge value, emotional value, and social value—are used to trace how critics articulate and combine different forms of literary worth. These values rarely appear in isolation; rather, they form “chains of value” where one dimension supports or enables another. The study reveals a recurring tension in the reviews: while critics often express skepticism toward the illness narrative genre as a whole, they simultaneously celebrate individual works that are perceived to transcend its presumed limitations. Emotional intensity, narrative authenticity, and existential insight are commonly praised, but only when accompanied by stylistic refinement. Gendered patterns also emerge. Women’s narratives are often valued for their emotional rawness and political resonance, while men’s narratives are praised for their intellectual reflection and emotional restraint. In conclusion, the article argues that Swedish literary criticism oscillates between suspicious and reparative modes of reading, ultimately revealing broader cultural assumptions about literature, illness, and value. By mapping these critical negotiations, the study sheds new light on the cultural positioning of illness narratives and the conditions under which they are granted cultural and literary legitimacy.
The Values of Shakespeare and Democracy: Criticism and Politics in Sweden and the Nordic Countries, 1880–1960 This article examines how notions of Shakespeare’s literary value are related to aspects of democracy, especially in criticism on Shakespeare by Nordic scholars, but also in performance and fiction. It particularly suggests that such relations develop along two tracks. One of them is to emphasize the differences between Shakespeare’s time and the present, thus bringing out the anti- or pre-democratic nature of early modern society; the other is to see Shakespeare’s value as universal – which, in the context of the time, often means casting Shakespeare as a representative of democratic values, tolerance and freedom. These strategies take on particular contextual significance at a time when the Nordic countries became democracies in the modern sense of the term, and when subsequently, those democracies were perceived as threatened during the 1930s and 40s. Thus, whether or not criticism embraces Shakespeare’s universal value, its assumptions reflect a highly specific political and historical background.
The Values of Literature as a discourse-historical field of study and an analytical terminology In this lecture, opening the Literary Values and Valuations symposium at Karlstad University in 2024, the paradoxes of ’literary value’ are examined in the contexts of their historical background in the tradition since the late 18th century of merging aesthetic and economic value, and the contemporary academic field of Economic Criticism. The rise of the so-called double discourse of value from early Romanticism onwards, as an ideologically biased opposition between materialist and humanist economies, still strongly affects everyday language and beliefs, and the modern concept of ’literary value’ is hampered by a number of inherent paradoxes which require historically informed scrutiny. What happens when scholars not only study the historical manifestations of value discourses, but also employ the highly contradictory concept of literary value as an analytical tool? A few remarks are also made in the lecture regarding the benefits and shortcomings of the discourse of literary value in comparison with other vocabularies of what is meritorious in literature in terms of taste, quality, or power.
